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Ask HN: Please help me get in touch with Apple's email privacy engineers

by bengtan on 6/22/21, 1:12 AM with 13 comments

With Apple's recent announcements about blocking tracking pixels in emails, I wonder if they might also consider doing something about tracking links too.

I wrote https://bengtan.com/blog/whats-in-email-tracking-links-and-pixels/ and I know of some techniques that can be used to bypass tracking links (ie. Discover the destination URL of a tracking link without actually crawling the tracking link).

It would be great for privacy if Apple also started disrupting tracking links (and then the rest of the email service providers do so too).

How do I get in touch with the Apple software engineer(s) who are working on email-privacy/anti-tracking-pixel software? I'm just a random no-name person on the Internet. Can anyone help me please?

Thanks.

  • by encryptluks2 on 6/22/21, 1:53 AM

    This seems like a case of inflated importance. If you want to contact engineers then you reach out to the company and see if they want to talk to you. This is like Joe Blow saying.. I have a great idea, we should change the background on Windows to rainbows... How do I get in touch with Bill Gates?

  • by SamBam on 6/22/21, 1:59 AM

    Your method seems to just involve knowing the standard rules that mail services use to provided tracking information, and removing those or reverse engineering them.

    What happens when one of the biggest email services, Apple, starts removing those tracking IDs? Marketing just rolls over and dies?

    It will be pretty trivial to keep changing up their url parameter system, or even to have unique urls that don't include query parameters at all, like the MailChimp system but without the simple Base64 encoding. Sure, it would be a bit of a pain to engineer, but needs must.

    It seems this would be better to make a browser extension, which can keep up with changes, and, honestly, would probably be small enough that marketers wouldn't bother trying to adapt to it.

  • by cjbprime on 6/22/21, 2:01 AM

    Write the blog post fully describing what you would say in conversation with them, then put a "I'd love to know that Apple privacy engineers considered these ideas, so please share it with them if you happen to know them." sentence at the top and wait?

  • by Trias11 on 6/22/21, 3:16 AM

    "Apple software engineer" is just a guy doing what he's been told.

    He has no decision making power.

    Lots of things related to privacy and security are part of a way bigger multi-billion dollar game than what companies are trying to mislead public with.

  • by EE84M3i on 6/22/21, 1:49 AM

    >In those cases where the destination URL is embedded into a tracking link, it’s possible to avoid tracking by decoding the destination URL and navigating to it directly. This is true for ConvertKit and could be true for Mailgun retailers like Substack (when or if I eventually work out the decoding).

    What stops a tracking link from using a different url in the get params than it actually returns? I don't think this is workable.

  • by drivingmenuts on 6/22/21, 3:38 AM

    I can see where tracking pixels need to be eliminated, but tracking links seem fairly legitimate because it requires an action on the part of the user to become effective. The solution is to not click links in marketing emails.

  • by LinuxBender on 6/22/21, 11:59 AM

    Do Apple email clients not let you disable external links in emails? Is this for cell phones? That would be a serious limitation of the client if true.

  • by vimy on 6/22/21, 2:36 AM

    File a radar.